An 8-month-old baby born without a feeding tube in Lucknow gets a new lease of life after a successful operation

Anjali Singh Rajput, Lucknow: Doctors in Lucknow gave new life to an eight-month-old baby by reconstructing his entire food pipe. The baby is from Nepal and has not had a feeding tube since birth. This challenging and complex surgery was performed by the doctors of the pediatric surgery department of the city’s ApolloMedics Hospital. In a nearly six-hour operation, doctors used his stomach to create a feeding tube. As the baby grows older, this feeding tube will increase.

The boy hails from Nepal and was referred to doctors at ApolloMedics Lucknow soon after birth. Dr. Deepak Kandpal, Senior Consultant, Department of Pediatric Surgery, said the child was having difficulty breathing and his complexion had turned blue. No matter how much the baby’s mother feeds him, food comes out through the mouth and nose because there is no tube. In medical terms this condition is called “pure esophageal atresia”.

This is how the operation was done
A team of experts led by Dr. Deepak Kandpal, Senior Consultant, Department of Pediatric Surgery, performed the surgery in stages. In the first stage, a tube was placed directly into the stomach to feed the baby and a hole was made in the neck to drain saliva.

When the baby’s mother tried to feed him for the first time, the baby could not swallow it, preliminary investigations revealed that the baby was born without a feeding tube. Normally one in every 3500 babies have problems with the food pipe, but this was a very serious case because the entire food pipe was not present at birth, so doctors had to create a new food pipe from the neck to the stomach.

There were two operations
The child underwent a second operation, called gastric transposition. This operation was recently done at the hospital when the baby turned eight months old and gained weight. Now the baby can drink milk by mouth and is completely healthy. The child has been released from the hospital.

MD Dr Mayank Somani said this is the second serious case successfully treated by doctors at ApolloMedics Lucknow in less than a year. Earlier, doctors treated a patient from Prayagraj who also underwent food pipe reconstruction surgery.